15 New Developer Tools for Code Geeks

Developing a well-coded and aesthetically well designed website –can usually end up becoming quite an endeavor for even the most skilled web developer. Developers as well as designers must now be able to stay abreast of current trends and web-standards and furthermore be able to determine ways by which to utilize them into their designs. Luckily, there are an unlimited amount of free developer tools which are available that can enable one to speed up their work load and work within a more efficient and productive way.

Below, we have listed some useful and fresh tools for web developers and designers. We hope that these tools will make your work flow smoother and allow you to save some time in doing the things that matter.

1. Converse.js : Open Source & Facebook Like Chat Clients

Converse.js is an open source chat application that can connect to any XMPP/Jabber server (like Google Talk,Skype, etc.). It sits in the footer of web pages just like Facebook-chat and has support for one-to-one or multi-user conversations. Contact requests can be accepted/declined, statuses can be set (online, away..) and there are “typing” notifications to inform the “listening” users.

2. Unicode- Table : Website for Unicode Characters

Unicode-Table is a website providing a great unicode character table that lists unicode numbers and HTML codes of any character. Characters can be sorted as categories and a search exists for locating them easily. Also, the website has an encode and decoder for converting any text.

3. Sylius : Open Source PHP E-Commerce Solution

Sylius is an open source and free e-commerce solution for PHP (and based on Symfony2). It is capable of managing stores of any size and having complex products + categories. Products can have different tax rates, many shipping methods are supported and it is integrated with Omnipay (multi-gateway payment processing library).

4. Pingendo : An IDE for Front-End Frameworks

Pingendo is a fresh IDE that is currently in beta status and available for Win + Mac. It is currently free (can become paid after the beta – no info on that) and focuses on easing web authoring. There is a DOM-tree editor which we can quickly view the tree and edit their styles and/or properties. Pingendo has built-in support for Bootstrap + Foundation frameworks an Font Awesome (more such stuff will be added).

5. Pure : CSS Framework by Yahoo

Pure is a fresh one that is created by Yahoo!. It uses Normalize.CSS anddoesn’t use any JavaScript but only HTML-CSS. The framework is built with responsive layouts in mind and has styles fortypography, grids, forms, buttons, tables and navigation. Markup used is very simple and the whole framework is pretty lightweight(5.7KB minified and gzipped).

6. Prepros

Prepros is an open source application for Windows OS that can do that automatically for Less, Sass, Scss, Stylus, Jade, Coffeescript, Haml and Markdown. It auto-compiles the source and injects the CSS (also HTML and JS) to the browser so that no refresh is needed. There are options for the compiling process like the output format or its style (compressed, nested..).

7. JSONmate : JSON Inspector & Visualizer

JSONmate is a web app that can beautify (and uglify) JSON strings where these strings can be directly pasted or loaded from a remote URL. Also, it has a very nice visual editor for customizing the data and a visualizer that provides a different view for it. JSONmate has support for JSONP too and it is an open source project.

8. PHP Fast Cache

phpFastCache is an open source PHP caching library that comes as asingle-file and can be integrated so quickly. It has support for multiple caching methods (apc, memcache, memcached, wincache, files, pdo and mpdo), the period of caching can be defined and has a very simplified API.

9. ICE Coder : PHP Powered and Open Source Web IDE

ICEcoder is an open source and web-based IDE that is built with PHP and works fast.
It works by simply dropping its app folder to anywhere we prefer and any files there (and inside subfolders) are ready to be edited. The syntax of the code is highlighted, broken tags and HTML structure are displayed + allows selecting them easily. There is support for Emmet and comes bundled with Adminer (for managing MySQL). ICEcoder has a powerful JavaScript API for easily interacting with it and it works with many popular languages (PHP, JS, CSS, LESS, Ruby, etc.).

10. Flatdoc

Flatdoc is the fastest way to create a site for your open source project. It is a small JavaScript file that fetches Markdown files and renders them as full pages. Essentially, it’s the easiest way to make open source documentation from Readme files. There is no server-side components, no build process needed.

11. Jekyll

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub. It is released under MIT License.

12. Web Colour Data

Web Colour Data is a web service to easily find out “which colors are used on a web page”. It works by simply submitting a URL and the service auto-extracts + analyzes the colors in it. The color palette is presented with a breakdown in percentages and hue distribution. Also, it is a good source of color inspiration as palettes used in many popular websites are displayed as well.

13. Froont : Responsive Web Design in the Visual Way

FROONT is a web-based design tool that runs in the browser and makes responsive web design accessible to all kinds of visual designers, even those without any coding skills. FROONT makes responsive web design visual. Design can be done in-browser with intuitive drag-and-drop tools. After all, humans judge design with their eyes therefore it seems just normal to see right away how designs will look across all different screen sizes. Each project has its own URL, that makes it easy to test the designs on real devices right away.

14. Editr

Editr is a HTML, CSS and JavaScript playground that you can host on your server. it is based on ACE Editor. It’s super easy to setup. It supports multiple instances on one page. Configurations are available via JS object or HTML attributes. Editr is licensed under MIT License.

15. Stringer : Open Source Anti-Social RSS Reader

Stringer is an open source self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader. Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms. But it does have keyboard shortcuts and was made with love.